Monthly Archives: May 2009

>That would be the US dollar, as more and more governments and investors around the world realize that the Treasury and the Federal Reserve are in the process of destroying the world’s reserve currency.

***…We are so f****d now that the only question is what kind of financial rubble we will find most useful in rebuilding the shattered wreck of an economy that will be left desolated by the remorselessly descending spiral of inflation/stagnation that now begins in earnest…***

***Were I China, sitting on some trillion dollars plus of Treasury bonds, I’d be nervous too. In fact, I’d be shortening duration like a madman, laying off anything but the shortest end of the T-bill curve and hedging like crazy, all the while doing my damnedest not to get caught so as to not ignite a stampede and risk getting trampled.

>The more we study it, the more it appears that people do not usually miss because they are bad shots, they miss because they are not paying attention. Concentration is what puts hits on the target. Distraction is what causes misses. The effective marksman learns to blot out all aspects of the situation but his sight picture and his trigger press. He must wear “psychological blinders” until after his target is down. This should be obvious, but apparently it is not.

>An alternative take on Memorial Day, focusing on why so many brave men were put in a position to make the ultimate sacrifice, from Jim Bovard via Bill St. Clair:***I stopped by the Visitors Center at Manassas Battlefield Park last month and was struck by a quote capturing Georgia private B. M. Zettler’s reaction to being enmeshed in the battle of Bull Run:

“I felt that I was in the presence of death. My first thought was, ‘This is unfair – someone is to blame for getting us all killed. I didn’t come here to fight this way…’

An excellent sentiment – one that should not be forgotten on Memorial Day. It would have been fairer if the politicians had been in the front lines on both sides at Manassas.

Sheldon Richman, the editor of The Freeman, proposes renaming Memorial Day as Revisionist History Day. General Patton said that an ounce of sweat can save a pint of blood. Similarly, a little reading and thinking this time of year can save a heap of grave digging in the future.

Sacralizing the war dead usually results in exonerating the politicians. Rather than parades, it would be better to celebrate this holiday like the British used to celebrate Guy Fawkes Day – by burning politicians in effigy, or a reasonable facsimile…***I spent my thinking time this Memorial Day wondering if the American military men and women who have died in combat for this country sacrificed themselves for:

– A Congress that routinely violates its enumerated powers under Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution;

– An Executive Branch whose occupants, from Abraham Lincoln to Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama, have also routinely violated the constitutional limitations on Presidential power found in Article II, Section 2;

– A morass of regulatory agencies whose self-promulgated regulations at the Federal level alone runs, as of the 2006 edition, at a mere 69,428 pages (and yes, Virginia, there are also separate regulatory agencies in every state and in many local governments); or

– The creation of an American national surveillance state, whereby information regarding millions of Americans’ everyday activities is collected, sorted, and analyzed for a myriad of purposes, each of which is not authorized by either Article I or Article II of the Constitution?

I think not.

Based on the historical record of the past 220 years, I believe that the Constitution has failed utterly in its sole purpose — to protect individual freedom and political liberty by restraining the powers of the central Federal government. As Judge Andrew Napolitano noted in his recent book The Constitution in Exile and Thomas DiLorenzo reiterated in this article:“Between 1937 and 1995, not a single federal law was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Not one piece of legislation was seen as exceeding the scope of Congress’s commerce power.”

Does that sound like an effective check on government’s natural tendency to expand ever more voraciously?

To those who believe that today’s problems stem from failing to regard the Founders’ original document, I would remind them that that the scope of the original document far exceeded the authority of the convention that drafted it. The Constitutional Convention of 1787 was convened “for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation”, not to create a whole new government of the United States. For more info on that point, see generally this record of the proceedings of the Continental Congress.

In other words, the Constitution itself, by the very circumstances of its birth, is an example of how government and the ambitious folks who populate such bodies have an insatiable desire for ever more power.

The original document also had no list of guarantees of individual rights; only when such a list was proposed for addition via amendment was the Founding Generation willing to ratify the Constitution. Even more tellingly, the original document, even when expanded by its first ten amendments, still allowed for chattel slavery and prohibitions on female suffrage. It took twelve more decades to rectify those fundamental errors, by which time othermetastases had occurred, both within the Constitution and by legislative action.

To those who assert that we, the American people, have failed, rather than the document itself, I would partly agree, while noting that only an ineptly-drafted agreement would have breach and penalty provisions so flaccid as those found in Article II, section 4.

To give just one example, let’s assume that a group of Senators exceeded their powers under Article I. Is it rational that the only remedy for that breach is the election jeopardy that each Senator might face in his or her own state? What if the Article I breach actually benefited the home states of the offending Senators, say by the award of contracts, military bases, or other kickbacks? Doesn’t the Constitution and its absence of effective enforcement mechanisms, especially in the wake of the 17th Amendment, actually encourage enumerated-powers violations?

Is such an impotent document truly the device by which the American people were to be protected from tyranny?

Does anyone really believe that any piece of paper can actually thwart the tendency of many humans towards plunder and other forms of evil?

To wit, we have a statist/Marxist constitutional law professor in the White House. He is violating the enumerated powers of the President listed in Article II, section 2 of the Constitution by his and his subordinates’ actions in the Chrysler secured debt cramdown and other aspects of the so-called “economic stimulus program.”

The constitutional law professor in the White House is committing these unconstitutional acts with the aid and comfort of both houses of the Congress, who are:

a) also violating the enumerated powers of the Congress pursuant to Article I, section 8 of the Constitution by their ongoing passage of numerous unconstitutional laws, as well as

b) failing to commence impeachment proceedings, pursuant to Article II, section 4, against the President for violations of the Article II, section 2 limitations on his power.

You now have center-right law professors such as Barnett and Glenn Reynolds [see, e.g., this entry and this entry] supporting a de facto rewrite of the Constitution via a constitutional convention, which, as Stewart points out above, will quickly turn into a rout, in whole and in part, of all freedom-oriented points of view.

Don’t think so? Then you should read Matthew Bracken’s account of a (fictional, for now) con-con held in America’s near future:

“… Tell me something Doug. You’re obviously a smart guy. I’ve been out of the country for seven years. What the hell happened to America? I always thought Americans would fight to keep their freedom. What happened? How could Americans just roll over and give up? What happened? How could we give up our rights without a fight?”

“Well, we didn’t just ‘give up’ our rights. It wasn’t like that. Not at all. It’s more like they were stolen in broad daylight, at the constitutional convention…”

Before you go and read the rest of the excerpt, consider these facts:

1) Statist/Marxist con-law professor in White House and his co-conspirators in Congress running amok in violation of the Constitution [thesis];

2) Center-right con-law professors calling for a con-con ostensibly to restrict the powers of the President and the Congress [antithesis]; and

3) Article V procedures that allow any subject matter — or even a completely new Constitution — to be considered and adopted at a con-con [synthesis]…

One thing is for sure: Barnett’s proposal — and the mental gymnastics of constitutional law professors in general — are not going to be the mechanisms whereby individual freedom is restored in North America.

That job is going to be, shall we say, less cerebral and much more action-oriented.

“Action-oriented”, in this context, means that when the rule of law fails (and it has), the rule of men begins (and it has). The “rule of men” is a civilized term for armed conflict, whereby each side kills, injures, steals from, and starves the other side until one side submits. The submitting side is usually enslaved and/or slaughtered immediately thereafter.

The sides in this conflict are clear: those who would control every aspect of Americans’ behavior, and those who refuse to be controlled.

The central issue is individual freedom. Nothing more and nothing less.

To the extent that certain documents from our country’s history help in that struggle for individual freedom, then use them in whatever manner possible.

But I will not conflate the goal of individual freedom with heedless allegiance to some flawed document which has failed, definitively, in its stated objective.

When I fight, I will be fighting for the same reasons as those Americans who are honored each year on Memorial Day:

To help my friends, and to stop the bastards who would take my freedom — whichever uniform they happen to be wearing.

Let’s win.

PS: Lest anyone think my recent postings on anarchy and related issues mean that I have flipped over into the la-la land where “peaceful behavior begets more peaceful behavior”, let me clarify. The only thing that begets peaceful behavior in most humans is the prospect of an immediate and life-threatening beating for contrary behavior.

Ergo, the only power that I would entrust to the post-conflict Federal government is the development and sustainment of absolute military superiority on land, sea, sky, and space. Domestically, I’ll trust that a thoroughly armed-and-trained citizenry, augmented with a minimal number of limited-jurisdiction, locally-controlled peace officers, would be sufficient to deliver the requisite amount of violence unto any miscreants, including any public servants who have slipped their leash.

3) Do you really think the FedGov can borrow enough money to bail out the PBGC, given its current and anticipated other debts?

4) Do you really expect millions of Americans, who will wake up some morning soon to learn that the bulk of their retirement nest egg has vanished, are just say “Oh, well” and go back to their morning chit-chat television program?

>Am headed for the woods, so bookmark this edition of The Art of War, then read it a section at a time.

The introduction:

Sun-tzu ping-fa (Sun Tzu The Art of War) is one of those rare texts that transcends time. Though it was written more than 2,000 years ago, it is arguably still the most important work on the subject of strategy today.

Written by a brilliant and experienced Chinese general named Sun Wu, The Art of War was intended only for the military elite of his time period. However, this treatise would later be absorbed by others of influence — from the fearless samurai in feudal Japan to the shrewd business leaders of the 21st century.

The book is even more fascinating than its background. Only reading it will one see the principles are timeless and true, the words pragmatic and universally applicable to any situation that requires absolute victory. Equally important, a person can learn to avoid disasters.

Thus enter Sonshi.com’s Sun Tzu “The Art of War.” Get ready to experience the most accurate and complete Sun Tzu ever presented to the public. Each sentence is to be read slowly, lest one misses its full meaning.

We hope you enjoy our translation as much as we enjoyed putting it together.

Sonshi.comAtlanta, Georgia

There is much wisdom there, both in understanding what the OpFor is doing and what American freedom fighters must do.

>Compare and contrast this essay from the American Thinker, describing today’s Obama Revolution, with this essay by Garet Garrett, describing the Roosevelt Revolution seventy-five years earlier.

Opening grafs in the AmThinker piece:

During the last 30 years we Americans have been so politically divided that some of us have called this left-right, liberal-conservative split a “culture war” or even a “second Civil War.” These descriptions are no longer accurate. The precise, technical word for what is happening in the United States today is revolution.

Because of our country’s history, we tend to think of revolutions as military conflicts, and of the revolutionaries as the good guys; the image of Minutemen fighting valiantly against the British forces at Lexington and Concord lies deep within our DNA. But sometimes — quite often, actually — revolutions aren’t military conflicts, and the good guys are the ones trying to keep the revolution from happening. In January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany by its elected president; he would spend the next two years consolidating his power with the legislative connivance of his political allies in the Reichstag. In October 1917, Lenin and his Bolsheviks took control of Russia from Kerensky and his Social Democrats — who had overthrown the Czar earlier that year — entirely through parliamentary maneuvering in Russia’s fledgling Duma.

What defines a revolution — and this is the crucial point to grasp — is that when it’s over, a country has changed not merely its leaders and its laws, but its operating system…

Opening grafs from the Garrett piece:

There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom.

There are those who have never ceased to say very earnestly, “Something is going to happen to the American form of government if we don’t watch out.” These were the innocent disarmers. Their trust was in words. They had forgotten their Aristotle. More than 2,000 years ago he wrote of what can happen within the form, when “one thing takes the place of another, so that the ancient laws will remain, while the power will be in the hands of those who have brought about revolution in the state.”

Worse outwitted were those who kept trying to make sense of the New Deal from the point of view of all that was implicit in the American scheme, charging it therefore with contradiction, fallacy, economic ignorance, and general incompetence to govern.

But it could not be so embarrassed, and all that line was wasted, because, in the first place, it never intended to make that kind of sense, and secondly, it took off from nothing that was implicit in the American scheme.

It took off from a revolutionary base. The design was European. Regarded from the point of view of revolutionary technique, it made perfect sense. Its meaning was revolutionary and it had no other. For what it meant to do, it was from the beginning consistent in principle, resourceful, intelligent, masterly in workmanship, and it made not one mistake…Take the time, please, to read both articles in full.

…We are now in the fait accompli of American socialist revolution. Most peoples’ ignorance of history doesn’t allow them to really grasp how rapidly this is happening now, but this wheel is turning like never before…

You can define a mythical creature with precision, observed St Thomas Aquinas, but that doesn’t make a phoenix exist. To be there, things actually have to have the property of existence. St Thomas would be a party-pooper in today’s politics, where “yes, we can” means that we can do whatever we want, even if it violates custom, the constitution or the laws of nature.

The television cartoon South Park offers a useful allegory for the administration’s flight from realism. In one episode the children’s teacher, Mr Garrison, gets a sex change, little Kyle gets negroplasty (to turn him into a tall black basketball star), while Kyle’s father undergoes dolphinplasty, that is, surgery to make him look like a dolphin.

Looking like a dolphin, of course, doesn’t make you one. Sadly, the Barack Obama administration hasn’t figured this out. Out of the confusion of its first 100 days, we can glimpse a unifying principle, and that principle looks remarkably like the sort of plastic surgery practiced in South Park.

Like dolphinplasty and negroplasty, it has given us cosmetic solutions that we might call civitaplasty, turning a terrorist gang into a state; fiducioplasty, making a bunch of bankrupt institutions look like functioning banks; creditoplasty, making government seizure of private property look like a corporate reorganization; matrimonioplasty, making same-sex cohabitation look like a marriage; and interfecioplasty, making murder look like a surgical procedure.

There is a consistent theme to the administration’s major policy initiatives: Obama and his advisors start from the way they think things ought to be and work backwards to the uncooperative real world. If reality bars the way, it had better watch out. In the South Park episode, the plastic surgery underwent catastrophic failures too disgusting to recount here. Obama’s attempt to carve reality into the way things ought to be will also undergo catastrophic failure, perhaps in even more disgusting ways.

Consider the reorganization of Chrysler, perhaps the most traumatic event to afflict the credit market in living memory. In 2007, Chrysler borrowed US$10 billion secured by its assets – real estate, brand names and other collateral. According to the US Bankruptcy Code, senior creditors have first claim on assets in the event of failure. The Obama administration, though, offered the senior creditors just 33 cents on the dollar, but gave a group of junior creditors, the United Auto Workers Union, 55 cents on the dollar. Most of the senior creditors are banks receiving federal assistance, and they of course did not object. Some creditors did object, and Obama denounced them on the airwaves as “speculators”. Some of the creditors received death threats, and other creditors report that the White House threatened to destroy their reputations.

This is not a credit market, but creditoplasty. What is it that gives existence to a credit market? “Credit” derives from the Latin verb credere, to believe. We trust other people with our money because we believe that they will repay it with interest, and because we believe that the courts will uphold our contractual rights in the event of a dispute. Credit markets do not exist in most of the world’s countries because faith is absent in the good will of counterparties and the impartiality of the law. In most countries, might makes right: the ruling clique takes what it wants, as King Ahab took Naboth’s vineyard. There is no rule of law. No one invests except through a corrupt deal with the ruling clique. No firm grows beyond what the members of a family can manage, and no excess capital remains in the country. Labor languishes for lack of capital.

A few countries, notably those blessed with a heritage of English common law, have credit markets. Savings turn seamlessly into investment, prospective retirees lend their savings with confidence to young people building families, homes and businesses, and tomorrow’s prospective income is transformed into today’s wealth through the power of faith in the future.

Obama’s handling of the Chrysler bankruptcy has destroyed this faith. No investor remains in the Chrysler deal out of belief in the company’s future, or out of faith in the legal system to uphold contractual rights. The big banks are there because Obama has them on life support. The smaller creditors are there because Obama has threatened them with reputational ruin, and persons unnamed have threatened them with violence. The UAW is here because it has a political deal with the White House. Violence, fraud and corruption hold together Chrysler Motors, in the sad template of Third World finance – not faith or belief. Force and fraud destroy faith, in fact, erase the possibility of faith for a very long time to come.

Apart from Chrysler, no investor trusts America’s largest banks. They can borrow money in the markets because the federal government guarantees it – nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars of bank bonds guaranteed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation have come to market this year. They can make profits if and when the government says they can, for the government tells each bank how much capital it must raise and by how much it must dilute its shareholders’ equity.

The banks depend on Treasury funding to securitize assets, and on the balance sheet of the Federal Reserve to provide a bid for their assets. They are not fiduciaries, but the product of fiducioplasty, the mere cosmetic appearance of banking. Cynical calculation about the administration’s political goals replaces assessment of bank business models, as I have chronicled at my finance blog, “Inner Workings”….

Do you grok, at long last, that voting, elections, and the necessary consequences thereof are precisely and exactly what got us to this point of history, and thus cannot, by definition, be the means by which this madness gets cured?

“HM Revenue and Customs staff will be able to examine people’s financial transactions on the scheme’s database and search for evidence of undeclared earnings or bank accounts.

The disclosure will likely to provoke further concern over the £5.5 billion project, which has been condemned as a waste of money and an invasion of privacy.

Campaigners have already raised fears the Home Office, police, and security officials would have access to the scheme’s database.

The scheme’s log records each time an ID card is used to verify a person’s identity when they make a high value purchase, open a bank account or take out a mortgage.

Tax officials could use the system to look for cases where large numbers of high value purchases have been recorded, which might indicate that a person earns more than they declare.”

As the socialist state progresses, it becomes essential to control all productivity. The initial impulse is the same as any other robber’s: to find out what to steal. Productivity is a curious thing, however, in how thoroughly pervasive it is in human affairs. If two kids trade marbles on the school playground, they both come away richer. Politically, it is quite a different matter in grown-up affairs, however, and all trade that takes place beyond the purview of the state must be found for purposes of control.

All other rationales for this are so much transparent bullshit. This is what it’s about.

Watch this, and you’ll see what Amsoc will finally bring to you by necessity.

America’s traditional legal system is all about laws and rights and contracts-a fine web of protections for the rights of the individual-and that tends to get in the way of vast schemes for government disposal of our lives and wealth.So President Obama has decided to throw out that existing legal system and knock down the protections for individual rights.

Our first major warning of this is the deal being forced on Chrysler’s “secured creditors.” These are institutions that loaned money to Chrysler when it was in trouble; they were willing to take the risk because they were relying on a legal principle which gives them first claim on the company’s assets in case of bankruptcy. Thus, in the worst case scenario, they expected to reclaim as much as 80 cents on each dollar of their investment, limiting their losses.

But the Obama administration wants them to accept only 29 cents on the dollar, in the name of “sacrifice.” The beneficiary of this sacrifice is the United Auto Workers, a Democratic pressure group which is being shoved to the front of the line and favored above the secured creditors.

How did Obama get these creditors to relinquish their rights? Major banks who have taken TARP money caved in first. When they were dragooned into taking government money last fall, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson swore that the government would not interfere in their operations or dictate their decisions-except, apparently, for dictating how much they lend, how much they pay their executives, how much they accept as a buyout in major bankruptcy cases, and so on.

As for the non-TARP lenders, Obama has publicly singled them out as villains to be punished-and one prominent bankruptcy lawyer says that Obama’s minions have been making direct threats to ruin firms who don’t accept the sacrifice of their rights. Tom Lauria of White & Case, which represents several of the secured creditors, explains in a radio interview that “One of my clients was directly threatened by the White House and in essence compelled to withdraw its opposition to the deal under threat that the full force of the White House press corps would destroy its reputation if it continued to fight.”

Venture capitalist Bill Frezza succinctly sums up the meaning of the Chrysler deal: “There’s no law to protect the politically unfavored in this country…”(emphasis added – WRSA editor)

>Most importantly, when the name of the game is deterrence, you always want the enemy to be unsure what action will provoke which reaction, especially if the reaction choices include devastating responses.

I just got off the phone with Navy Seal Capt. Larry Bailey (Ret.) of Gathering of Eagles, and he told me that Gathering of Eagles and ProTroopEvents.com, regretfully, have no choice but to cancel the rally scheduled for June 13 on the National Mall in Washington D.C.

Capt. Bailey said that the reason he had to cancel the rally is because the wealthy individuals who had promised considerable funding failed to come through with the necessary funds – in other words, they turned out to be “all hat, no cattle.”

This was very frustrating for him because if he had not relied on their word, which he thought was good, he could have tried to raise the needed funds another way – he has done two other rallies on the Mall and it takes a minimum of $75,000.00 to do it right, with a big stage, sound system, and all that goes with it.

We here at Oath Keepers regret that we will not be able to attend that rally as part of our outreach to spread the Oath Keepers message, and this also means we Oath keepers will not be meeting on June 14 (we had planned on an additional meeting the next day).

We hope that not too many of you had already scheduled transportation and rooms. Please pass on this information to anyone you know who had planned on attending.

SOME GOOD NEWS:

Oath Keepers is getting invitations from all over the country to speak at July 4 Tea Parties, and to hold oath ceremonies like we held at the Knoxville Tea Party on April 15 and at Lexington on April 19.

We will post announcements about those Oath Keepers speeches and oath ceremonies at July 4 Tea Parties just as soon as they are 100% confirmed (and once we are absolutely positive they are going forward).